Apparently no one's made a port of Contra to the TI-83 Plus yet, so I've decided to make one. It's going to be written in Axe, and I'm going to try to make it as close to the original NES game as possible. Thankfully, Contra maps aren't that big

Right now I'm still working on the sprites and basic movement, and I still can't find my calc cable, so I can't post anything I have down yet, unfortunately.

EDIT: Finally got around to making a decent intro.



Bryan Thomas's Contra game is impressive as a BASIC program, but the fact is that TI-BASIC is too slow of a language to handle much more than that. So when I found out about Axe, I thought: since this language is so much faster than BASIC and still makes it very easy to make graphical games, why not try it again? The original NES game was one of my favorite games ever made for that platform. If we could have something like that for the calculator, wouldn't that be awesome?

I'm still only starting on this thing, and there's a lot left to be done before I can release it as the final version I wanted to make, so it's going to take a while. I want to make this as close of a port as possible, if not a clone (some stuff might get left out, like the vertical and "3D" Contra levels). Right now it's planned as a single-player game (no Lance, sorry) with as many of the enemies, powerups, and other parts of the original gameplay as possible.

So far, you can run, jump, and fire as Bill. Swimming is implemented partially, but sprites haven't been changed to match (in the demo, you "walk" on the water). Rifle box enemies can fire at you but don't take damage yet, thought I've reserved data space for their health. Soldiers can spawn, run, and jump all right, but I managed to glitch up the soldier-spawning engine right before the demo was released, so you won't see it here. Sorry.

Level engine is also pretty complete, at least in tilemapping. I'm planning to have this support external level packs so I can keep the actual game as small as possible. External level support is still at nil because I'm planning to add that after I finish more important parts of the engine. In the demo you can see a sort of mock-up of the classic Contra level 1, minus soldiers, powerups, bosses, and some other stuff. When you get to the end of the level it just glitches. Still got a lot of work to do.

No idea when the final version's gonna be released. Sometime this year or the next.



EDIT2: Bill and Lance mixed up, fixed.

Perhaps you haven't managed to find this epic game, then?

http://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/360/36075.html

Yep, played that. It's really good, and especially for BASIC, but it's pretty far from the original game. It'll be easier to make a more realistic port with Axe.

Aight, that sounds like a good and ambitious plan, then. Since you said you were surprised no one had attempted it for the 83 series, it seemed like you might not have been aware of it. I suppose you're set on Axe, you wouldn't consider using something like ASM instead?

Definitely not for this. I'm too new to ASM to make a big game.

Awww, sorry to hear it. Good luck anyway, and I look forward to your updates. Do you have any timeline or time frame in mind?

Not at all. I never do

That's probably a sane thing to do, especially at this point in the semester.

Yes, it was one of the few games I downloaded from ti-calc that actually worked. I thought it was ok. I did not like the slow response form the weapon. I do not know if he made it that way for a reason, but I have produced bullets with ten points respond quicker than that. Other than that I thought it was very entertaining. I would definitly love to see more about this newer version.

Well, you're forgetting that his engine is handling a ton of other stuff at the same time as updating bullets, so don't think you're a better coder than him just because of that.

Thanks for bumping this I gotta get back to coding this.

Anyway, updates (really old): Started over, then nearly started over again when I corrupted my archive. But I now have enemies and firing and sidescrolling and all that fun stuff working. Right now I'm trying to figure out the best way to make the soldiers' AI, but the AI for those firing boxes is totally finished (with lots of messy code ). I'll post a screenshot when I can.

Great, I look forward to the screenshots! Glad to hear you've gotten this back underway.

I actually did like this game as I said it was entertaining, and I already knew why it had a slow response. It took to long to get through the program and execute the fire command. But, it does take a little ronger time to fire a shot off than I thought it would.

Ah, makes sense. Well, I'm sure there are at least some optimizations, both command-level and flow-level, that could be made; no programmer is perfect, and some are farther from perfect than others. For the sake of education, did you look through the code a bit to see wherein the slowdown is coming?

I felt that the way it was programmed was fine as far as levels and play capability. It was actually quite superior to a lot I have downloaded. I would recommend downloading. I believe that the programs where protected though. I could look, though, my last computer crashed and my calc has had a crash shortly after I downloaded it. nothing to do with it of course. So I have to download it again.

As long as you're running Doors CS (I hope you're running Doors CS!) edit-protection is more or less irrelevant.

By the way, question about that BASIC game: Did anyone notice the string he stored high scores in was write-protected? Seems like he took advantage of a really obscure bug to do that. It's brilliant.

Strings can't be write-protected.... Maybe he used XtraVar?

Nope, apparently he took advantage of string recalling glitches (try putting a string with just "p", the p found in the Stats menu, in Ans, then try recalling it).

I finally, finally received my TI-Graphlink cable! So here's something worth sharing, I guess. Not much. Sorry.



EDIT: Link changed. Edited.